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H.J. Heinz Co. celebrated its 100th year in Leamington, Ont., in September 2009. Despite the recession, company officials gushed about the future of the factory, where up to 300 bottles of ketchup flew off the assembly line every minute. The production line would be there for “a long time,” they said. And why not? It wasn’t like North Americans were about to stop eating burgers and fries.

Four years later, Pittsburgh-based Heinz has suddenly soured on the tomato capital of Canada. It will close the Leamington plant in June, eliminating 740 jobs. The company’s new owners, which include Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, say the facility had become unprofitable despite the recovering U.S. economy—the latest example of a big corporation pursuing a strategy of aggressive cost-cutting, even as sales appear set to revive.

What happened in Leamington was not an isolated incident. In recent months, scores of big employers across Canada have made similarly distressing announcements: Sears is laying off nearly 800 workers; Hallmark plans to move 300 jobs to the U.S.; Kellogg’s is closing a cereal plant in London and laying off 500; U.S. discount retailer Big Lots is shuttering 78 Canadian stores and slashing 1,600 jobs; Potash Corp. is culling 1,045 workers, including 440 in Saskatchewan and 130 in New Brunswick; and natural gas producer Encana is dumping 800 employees. Even the Bank of Montreal quietly eliminated nearly 1,000 positions in the fourth quarter—despite posting a record full-year profit of $4.2 billion. The list goes on. The job losses aren’t relegated to any one sector; they’re all over the map—manufacturing, resources, retail, finance—making it difficult to point to a sector that can be counted on for robust growth this year.

Experts say it’s more than just a coincidence. “The Canadian economy is far weaker than anyone expected it to be,” says Mike Moffatt, an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey School of Business. And while that’s never welcome news for the job market, the slump couldn’t come at a worse time for Canadian families who are up to their eyeballs in debt. Statistics Canada recently said households owe a record $1.64 for every dollar they earn.

Escaping the crushing weight of all those mortgages and lines of credit requires job creation and income growth, which is looking like an increasingly tall order. The 179,100 jobs the Canadian economy created in the 12-month period leading up to November was, except for the Great Recession, the worst showing of any comparable period since 2001. Put another way, in 2012, an average of 25,400 jobs were added every month. In 2013, monthly job gains were barely half that amount. And many of those new positions are increasingly temporary or part-time. Of the 21,600 new jobs in November, fewer than one in 10 were in full-time positions—hardly ideal for supporting a family or paying off a big mortgage.

In fact, economists predict Canada’s unemployment rate will surpass America’s in 2014 for the first time in five years. And, while an apples-to-apples comparison of the two countries’ unemployment figures is fraught—for technical reasons having to do with how they’re calculated—psychologically speaking, the event will come as a shock to Canadians lulled into believing we are somehow economically superior; that with all the talk of recovery, our jobs would be safer.

The net effect is a recovery that feels more like the recession that preceded it. Politicians boast about Canada’s exceptionalism, but it’s rapidly becoming apparent that our economy is a lot less dynamic than we’d been led to believe. “We were running up this huge housing and construction boom that, economically, probably didn’t make much sense, and covered up a whole lot of sins,” Moffatt says. “I think we’re finally starting to recognize that, five years after the financial crisis, there are still a lot of people looking for work.”

Canada is facing a jobs crisis with its stagnating labour market and, unless things pick up soon, the financial crunch many families are already feeling is going to get worse.

The narrative about Canada’s economic performance during the 2009 recession is well-known: Buoyed by “prudent” banks, federal officials deftly pulled on their policy levers to make it easier for Canadians to borrow money to buy cars, houses and gadgets. All that spending propped up the economy and bolstered the job market while other countries grappled with massive unemployment. “Canada now has the best job-creation record in the G7—one million net new jobs since the depths of the recession,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper reminded Canadians in a recent speech.

But such rosy pronouncements are at odds with the bleak performance of the Canadian economy in the last few months. It began slowing rapidly in 2012, and very nearly ground to a halt last year with GDP growth of just over 1.6 per cent. The reason? Consumers are finally tapped out. “Domestically, the growth drivers aren’t really there anymore,” says Benjamin Reitzes, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets. “We’re still going to see consumption growth, which is the largest part of the economy, but it’s not going to be the leader it once was.”

One of the first sectors to get hit will be Canada’s overheated housing market, which almost single-handedly pulled the country through the recession. While many (including this magazine) have predicted a crash, even a marked slowdown threatens to kneecap a construction sector that grew right alongside the forest of condo towers that now dominate the skylines of cities such as Toronto and Vancouver. Taken together, construction and real estate account for more than nine per cent of all Canadian jobs, a level not seen since at least 1976, the furthest back Statistics Canada data go. What’s more, the construction and real estate sectors make up close to 20 per cent of Canada’s economy, meaning a slowdown will have a significant knock-on effect through other industries. As it stands, economists expect Canada’s economy to tick up by between 2.3 and 2.7 per cent in 2014 and, even then, it’s worth noting that most economists, as well as the Bank of Canada, have consistently been too optimistic in their forecasts. Ahead of 2013, economists at one time predicted GDP growth of three per cent for that year, only to be later forced to revise their estimates downward to closer to 1.7 per cent.

Another sector that’s particularly exposed to a real estate slowdown is finance. Canadian banks have come to rely heavily on consumer and mortgage lending for their earnings. When the Bank of Montreal shed roughly two per cent of its workforce last quarter, most of the cuts came from the bank’s Canadian personal and commercial banking operation. Analysts predict further cuts are inevitable if the pace of lending continues to slow.

At the same time, governments across the country are in the process of slashing public sector positions in a bid to erase the deficits they rang up during the recession. Various levels of government slashed a record 5.3 per cent of public service positions in the 12 months leading up to December, equivalent to 51,600 jobs, according to BMO’s Reitzes. The figure doesn’t include Canada Post’s plan to phase out home delivery, which will eliminate the need for 6,000 to 8,000 positions.

Is it any wonder critics are poking holes in the Harper government’s claims about all the jobs created since the recession? Jim Stanford, an economist with Unifor, the new union created by the merger of the Canadian Auto Workers and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers, recently wrote in a report that the addition of more than one million jobs since 2009 is far less impressive, when one considers that Canada’s working-age population has grown by 350,000 people per year during that time—among the fastest rates in the developed world. In fact, the gradual decline in Canada’s unemployment rate has more to do with declining labour-market participation: Frustrated job-seekers who give up on their searches altogether are not counted in the official statistics. A better measure of job-market performance, Stanford argued, is the overall employment rate, which looks at how many working-age Canadians actually have jobs. That figure currently sits at 61.8 per cent, barely improved from the pit of the recession and below the level it was a decade ago. Without vigorous job growth that exceeds increases in the population, things aren’t going to get any better. “No wonder it still feels like a recession in the labour market,” Stanford notes. “By this key measure, we are hardly any better off than during the darkest days of the financial crisis.”

The best-case scenario for Canada’s slumping economy, it seems, is for Uncle Sam to come to the rescue just as Canadian consumers cut up their credit cards. Economists at the Royal Bank of Canada predict a recovering U.S. economy could boost Canadian GDP growth to 2.6 per cent this year by sparking demand for everything from B.C. lumber to Ontario-made automobiles.

But it’s not clear that will translate into big employment gains. One of the more curious features of the spate of recent Canadian factory closures is that, while production is often being moved to lower-cost regions in the U.S. and overseas, the jobs are seldom going along with it. In early December, Switzerland’s Novartis said it was closing a Ciba Vision plant in Mississauga, Ont., that makes contact-lens solution and moving production to a plant in Fort Worth. “It’s important to note that 300 jobs are not moving to Texas,” Mark Smithyes, head of government affairs and market access for Alcon Canada, a division of Novartis, told the Canadian Press. “The production is being absorbed into our Fort Worth plant, but we’re not looking at hiring additional workers.” Similarly, Heinz announced the closure of two other North American plants in November in addition to Leamington, affecting a total of 1,350 positions. But there are only plans to hire 470 employees at the five factories that will pick up the extra work.

Call it the new reality of today’s marketplace: In the face of modest growth, the path to better profits comes mainly from figuring out how to make the same number of widgets with fewer workers. “The cruel joke, when it comes to manufacturing in Ontario, is that productivity is up about 30 to 40 per cent over the past decade,” Ivey’s Moffatt says. “But the problem is that we manufacture about the same amount as we did 10 years ago, so that essentially means a 30 to 40 per cent reduction in the size of your labour force.” It’s not a phenomenon affecting only manufacturing, either. Advances in robotics and other technology are allowing HR departments in both blue- and white-collar industries to streamline their workforces, with at least one recent Oxford University study suggesting as many as half of all occupations could be subjected to some degree of automation over the next two decades.

Hastening the trend are myriad taxpayer-funded deals being made available to companies seeking to modernize their facilities with the latest labour-saving innovations. Kellogg’s Canada, for example, chose to close its 90-year-old cereal plant in London, Ont., and lay off 500 workers, just five years after the Ontario government promised to give the company $9.7 million to build another plant 3½ hours east in Belleville. It employs 150.

Ian Lee, an assistant professor at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business, calls the continued decline of Canadian manufacturing “deeply troubling.” He blames a lack of wage competitiveness, high taxes and, in Ontario, efforts to promote costly green-energy sources that have helped set the stage for a crippling 33 per cent rise in energy prices in the province over the next three years.

Of course, things could always be worse. James Marple, a senior economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank, says Canadians have actually had it pretty good since the global economy screeched to a halt in 2009, and that we shouldn’t feel jealous of our American counterparts, now that their economy is finally on the mend. “Really, they’re just finally catching up after such a poor performance for so long,” he says, adding that “we typically have a Canadian economy that does better when America does better.”

Canada also happens to be blessed with a huge store of natural resources that most countries can only yearn for. In oil-rich Alberta, that’s translated into an unemployment rate of 4.7 per cent. In Saskatchewan, the jobless rate is even lower, at 4.1 per cent.

For all that, though, the resource sector has also shown signs of weakness, as demonstrated by the recent layoffs at Potash Corp. and Encana. Potash prices have plunged in the wake of the breakup of the world’s largest potash-export cartel in the former Soviet Union. Encana, meanwhile, has suffered amid a glut of natural gas that’s driven down prices. Even Alberta’s oil patch, which the Harper government is counting on to make Canada an “energy superpower,” has suffered from an inability to get its crude to market, even as new technologies such as fracking unlock reserves elsewhere. In fact, the International Energy Agency is predicting that the U.S., once the world’s biggest importer of oil, could become the world’s biggest exporter of crude by 2015. With new supplies coming online amid a slowdown in emerging-market economies such as China and India, some economists believe this cycle of sky-high commodity prices could be coming to an end. That doesn’t mean oil prices are about to collapse back to $20 a barrel, as they did in the 1990s. But higher production costs in the energy sector mean companies will have to react fast to any further price declines, and the easiest way to do that is to slash jobs.

It’s happened before. The 1980s oil glut sent the price of crude tumbling, taking jobs in Western Canada with it. Ironically, it was also a time when money poured into southern Ontario’s manufacturing sector to take advantage of the cheap dollar and skilled workforce, creating a sense of giddiness in the province. Now, many of those factories are shuttered or in the process of being wound down, leaving workers to feel like the plump, red tomatoes that will soon stop rolling through the Heinz factory in Leamington—squeezed—while Canadians elsewhere are left to wonder if they could be next.

Reality is we have governemtn devaluing our money, adding debt to us, our kids and our grand kids thinking its moral… we have tax greedy government treating productive people like economic slaves….

You bet our economy is going to crater. Rapid inflation, lower value incomes is going to ravage the Canadian economy in not too long.

Too many economic idiots running the show. Heinz left as with a 7.5 cent drop in the loonie they know prices of tomatoes went up 8.1% and their big customers dropped the contracts so the plant is/was no longer needed and no longer profitable.

Thats the reality of a devalued economy of ponzi fraud debt.

My only regrets in this is that I underestimated the Ottawa corruption and wish I had put more of my money offshore as while 54% of my portfolio is doing well offshore, the 46% in Canada is losing value fast. But I do better than most as I realize the worst enemy to wealth in Canada is our own governments.

The thing about Heinz is, that those are only the 740 direct factory lay-offs comin’.
Now, where do you think ALL those tomatos in Heinz ketchup comes from? That’s right, countless number of (Tomato, Vegetable…)Farmers, and spinoff seasonal workers in and around Leamington-Essex areas that “depend” on Heinz are SOL.
Over 100 years of Farmers dedicated to growing what Heinz needed.
It’s devasting.

Just looking at that “pink-slip parade” list makes me realize just how bad our Federal gov’t really is. Harper is a fenian-loving SOB.
Unless it has anything to do with Oil-Barons Harper and Cons actually do NOT care about the rest of Canada at all. “Outsourcing” either down south and/or overseas is beyond rampant, and our elected CON Gov’t, that is supposed to represent and protect it’s Canadian Citizens, prefers to sleep with Multi-international/Foreign-owned Giant Corporations instead, :(
What is happening to our Manufacturing, R&D,…, in Canada ???

You apparently didn’t bother reading the part of the article that talked about the impact of high energy prices and taxes in Ontario on cost of production. The federal government can be absolutely stellar in their handling of the economy, and the provincial governments can still foul things up utterly.

There are a few things that are a little out of whack here. One, the corporate tax rate overall is the lowest of the G& (as the Cons continually remind us) including the U.S. yet the Cons are still calling for lower taxes. Two: the Cons themselves admit that lowering taxes did not result in the creation of jobs but rather filled the pockets of investors and created huge cash inventories that companies refused to re-use. Three: the Cons have been telling us that the unemployment rates are going down despite huge job losses and jobs gains restricted to part-time work. For years the number of jobs created were less than the jobs lost yet we were being told that they created millions of jobs. We have been conned by this regime for years. Please explain how a regime can lower taxes yet tell our young people that there is not enough money to fund the OAP obliging them to work for an extra two years. There are total disconnects between the facts (something Cons want us to dismiss) and the myths that the Cons are perpetuating.

Ontario has made some rather boneheaded moves as far as power generation goes – ones we Ontarians will be paying for for some time to come. Some of us more than others (my house is heated with electricity – so I know where every cent of my wage increases for the next eon is going).
That’s not a political statement; that’s reality. See point (a) in your first post on this thread.

Why did you omit the bit about wage competitiveness? Lee is basically saying Ontarians are overpaid – he’s delusional.

It may be true the liberals made a mistake with their green agenda, but it seems to me to be essentially an honest one…an attempt to address climate change. The important thing is for them to man up and fix the problems if that’s the case.

Wage competitiveness is a real problem, but it’s something awfully hard for a government to address. The issue is that people elsewhere are willing to work for less. In contrast, governments have a great deal of control over things like taxation or green energy mandates.

Well, it’s pretty simple, isn’t it? We can’t effectively do anything to increase wage competitiveness without doing something we don’t want to do – cut wages. So, governments need to mind other factors that they DO have control over – like taxation, regulation, and other factors impacting the cost of doing business.

Atomic_Walrus on January 8, 2014 at 6:17 pm

Hmmm, at what point does that become a race to the bottom? Or simply a war of tax jurisdictions that business can effectively play off of?

kcm2 on January 8, 2014 at 6:38 pm

I think we may have already passed that point…

KeithBram on January 8, 2014 at 6:53 pm

I must have been sleeping or in denial. :)

kcm2 on January 8, 2014 at 7:02 pm

I look at it as more of a team effort. Bith federal and provincial governments are screwing us. Ottawa buys the provinces debt that no legitimate lender would touch. No way to I lend money at returns that are below _real inflation + taxes for a negative value return.

An example. If last year I cold buy an item for $1000, but I bought Ottawa bonds at 1%, with 8.1% real inflation the same item costs me $1081 this year, with a $10 taxable return, I lost 7.5% in value.

I call this negative value investing and its why many pensions need more money to pay out less.

A huge fraud by Ottawa and the provinces. All for fraud low debt. And it will not end well, its why I now have 54% of my investments outside of failing Canada. My only regrets is not going 100% outside of Canada as this country isn’t worth investing in.

Agreed. But how is the low value CAD currency work’in for ya? NDP have been crying for low value money and now that it is here plants close as every raw input costs 8.1 more.

Inflation from currency devaluation for debt is a nasty thing be it Ottawa or provincial debt. As a 10% drop in currency value is acutally 1 / .9 = 11.11% inflation in terms of CAD currency.

And with all the ponzi fraud debt our governments are spinning for low interest rates, the system will adjust by devaluing money. And devaluing money impacts your incomes, pension and costs of living in Canda just went up. A 7.5% CAD currency drop last year is a real 8.1% inflation to all of us, a compounding inflation tax.

Its why Canada just screwed itself. It isn’t worth doing business here as Canda is a negative value economy of ponzi fraud government debt and taxes. Tax inflated and depreciating in value…..you would need 14% ROI to justify 2013 investments, as 4% would go to taxes.

Only materials purchased outside of Canada would cost 8.1% more, unless Canadian suppliers jacked their rates. Which would counterbalance the gains found by a lower dollar and thus would gain them no new markets.
You’re – at best – oversimplifying.

The 179,100 jobs the Canadian economy created in the 12-month period leading up to November was, except for the Great Recession, the worst showing of any comparable period since 2001.

“The worst showing since 2001, except for the Great Recession” doesn’t make sense, unless I’ve misunderstood… If the comparative time frame goes back 12 years, then why mention the exclusion of an event from almost 100 years ago?

The Ontario Liberal-McGuinty-Wynne government committed to high cost electricity into the face of a glut of cheap greenish (in a transitional sense…natural gas replacing coal) natural gas glut meaning dirt cheap electricity in the American manufacturing heartland.

Plus, Ontario is dumping electricity at cheap prices across the border to the US because of their commitment to pay intermittent alternative energy producers in Ontario.

So unless you are an auto company or a technology multinational like Cisco who is able to get massive public subsidies to continue to do business in Ontario, you are shutting up and leaving.

Canadian Liberals were suckered by American Democrats into destroying Ontario.

Germany and the growing parts of Europe are starting to build coal-fired electricity generation again, some of it the most dirty soft lignite coal type for cheap electricity, and they are getting a lot of their coal from Obama and the American “greenies”.

Ain’t nobody stopping or lying in front of the coal trains from blue states to the coast for export to Europe and Asia.

The Ontario Liberal government has basically locked in for a generation the highest electricity costs in North America. It’s economic future is now entirely dependent on trickle down from banksterism and the 1%’ers. This is great for a few square kilometres of downtown Toronto.

The Liberals are bringing us the American model of prosperity in DC (Ottawa) and Manhattan/Wall Street (Bay Street) and basically nowhere else.

whyshouldIsellyourwheat on January 8, 2014 at 2:38 pm

This has nothing to do with the Ont govt….Lib or Con so stop whining.

EmilyOne on January 8, 2014 at 2:40 pm

The highest electricity costs for the next generatioin is the responsibility of Liberals. It has basically shut down the real economy in Ontario for the next generation.

Ontario is now entirely reliant on trickle down from financialization and banksterism, and from the hogs feeding at the federal taxpayer trough in Ottawa.

whyshouldIsellyourwheat on January 8, 2014 at 2:43 pm

No….it hasn’t. Stop it.

EmilyOne on January 8, 2014 at 2:48 pm

If this analysis is accurate, it would seem that the Harper government’s endlessly-vaunted Economic Action Plan has been a boon only to its own ad agency.

Your job isn’t as likely as safe as you think. With the CAD losing 7.5% value it is going to pass in (1 / .925 ) 8.1% inflation from peanut butter to autos to home build prices. Everything is going to see 8.1% inflation.

People who spend more but get less may push GDP, but because less goods and services are rendered, this means job losses as jobs produce goods and services not GDP.

The drop in the loonie makes people like me in great shape as I have been lowering my CAD investments for 4 years favoring offshore. So to me, I got a 8.1% gain in terms of CAD, but I am under no illusion, Ottawa and provinces debt has just lowered the value of Canadian money.

ABove quotes the two largest currencies int he world, and our governemtn is devaluing your lives, your pensions, your savings…..its why I know Canada is going to have a crash in 2014…..as Canada is a negative value debt-tax economy of debt. There can be no good outcome of BoC policy of devalued money for government bloat.

Note, I said value not money. Value accounts for currency depreciation and inflation. That is, can I buy more after investing a $1000 or can I buy less with the returns.

TSX rose about 8.8% in the last year. Currency depreciated by 7.5%. So 8.8% minus taxes is about 6.9%, this 6.9% – 7.5% means a 0.6% reduced value.

A negative value economy of ponzi fraud debt and government bloat.

Fortunately I did a lot better than that being offshore in different currencies I didn’t get the full brunt of devalued money. But then I don’t listen to government and bank propaganda. Even CPP is going offshore.

Okay, I’ll spell it out for you. A recession is defined as two or more quarters of negative GDP growth. That hasn’t happen in Canada in years.

Ketchup likely quit because of the whacko energy policies of the Ontario government. The value of the CAD in USD has dropped in the last year. If it was CAD that caused them to quit, they would have done so a year or more ago.

“Ian Lee, an assistant professor at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business, calls the continued decline of Canadian manufacturing “deeply troubling.” He blames a lack of wage competitiveness, high taxes and, in Ontario, efforts to promote costly green-energy sources that have helped set the stage for a crippling 33 per cent rise in energy prices in the province over the next three years.”

Consumers create jobs. If consumers don’t have the income, then they can’t spent. Stop the right-wing bs that business creates jobs.

I am a bit surprised that there has been so little/if any discussion about the emerging protectionist mentality of the US and the impacts it is having on the Canadian manufacturing sector. John Deere, Kellog’s, Catepillar, Resolute Forest Products, Heinz, etc. – all closing their doors, packing up the manufacturing equipment purchases with provincial and federal stimulus dollars and taking it with them to the US to increase US base employment and production as a result of US federal support to do so. This is why foreign ownership of Canadian companies fails to meet the needs and desires of Canadians themselves. We can thank international agreements like NAFTA, the softwood lumber agreement and the disolving of the wheat board for supporting American interests. Get involved and be an intelligent Canadian. Know Canadian products, buy Canadian products, download the free app “Made In?” and support your local friends and family. Stop shooping at Walmart, support Canadian owned companies. Stop making excuses to save those measly few cents at large US bulk stores. Modern economic theory is just now coming to terms with the fact that economic specialization results in increased consumption, at the cost of national economic diversification and an associated increase in financial vulnerability.

The Americans are realizing it now and are calling their companies and jobs to come home ~ as a nation, we should be doing the same.

I also lost my job in the past few months from a Canadian company. I would like to add that Clearly Contact in Vancouver cut a number of jobs in July. When In inquired how many jobs were to be cut, I was told it was in the triple digit range. I immediately started to look for a job and after being employed with the same company for a number of years was surprised to find that there wasn’t much out there. I am currently looking for another job in various cities.

A great point made in this story is that the ‘unemployment rate’ doesn’t count people who aren’t on unemployment because they only were able to draw for a specific amount of time and weren’t able to find anything once their benefits ran out. It’s interesting that unemployment rules changed just before all these layoffs across the country. I’m seriously worried about my future in this economy.

Get your money out of the system before the banks “Bail in” your savings, Buy gold and silver, stock up on food and water, this so called recovery is gonna become a full blown economic collapse thanks to the extreme money printing by all the central banks.

Ian Lee of Carleton University’s quote on Ontario’s 33% rise in energy prices are due to Nuclear refurbishment of Darlington and the siting of a Nuclear Waste “suppository”, it is not due to green energy development (which, contrary to popular belief only amounted to a 10% increase). Might want to check your facts McLeans before you publish a slanted story.

The report was an eye opener for Canadians. Brings to light how Ottawa is indifferent to labOr class. It would have been nice if Chris provided his suggestions. Ione solution I can think off to make production affordable in Canada is to introduce Import duty on imports from China and Major exporters to Canada.

Lessons can be learnt from countries like India who introduced anti dumping duty when China was dumping it products to kill local industry. Import duty should be just enough to make Canadian manufacturing viable. I don’t know how many of you know that countries exporting to Canada are giving local manufacturers subsidies against proof of exports to make their products viable in Canada. We must stop manufacturing from leaving Canada as this is backbone of our economy.

Looking to compile a list of factories in Canada that have been shutdown. We are producing a documentary on ‘Why Factories Shutdown’ Hopefully we can provide a history of the factories that have been destroyed with an explanation of why and the effects to our children’s future.

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